Getting 60 thousand pageviews with 2 carefully constructed posts

Max misappropriates value from follower count. He says that the new followers that were valuable were "real business men with high follower to followee counts" (um, spammers?) and that the second article got him followers that were "unimportant people with low follower counts"<p>This is backwards. Get those first kind of people to follow you and they may retweet your stuff once in a blue moon but it's just noise amongst the rest of their noise. Get a lot of that second group to follow you and those people will GO TO BAT for you. They're real, engaged followers. Your tweets are far more likely to register with them (or even just be seen) and they can just as easily start network effects that reach the big boys anyway. As a whole they're far more valuable than 1000 of the 'real business men'.

So, essentially we've been social engineered :)<p>Congratulations!<p>Knowing that I might be a bit more reluctant to visit maxklein.posterous.com links in the future.

<i>I wrote the articles to test my theories on what captures attention on the internet</i><p><i>I don't have any analytics installed on this site</i><p>That seems counter-intuitive?<p>To me this reads purely like deliberate controversy to get some notoriety. The posts you mention I actually read (both I think) and found one of the 2 to be of interest. To suggest they were some sort of trick just seems weird.

This article was as informative as someone who would write "Getting 60K pageviews by a carefully constructed competition"<p>It's not hard to get page views.<p>I have approx 30K page views per post and great discussions around them and re-tweets up the yazoo, but it's based on what I find interesting, what I want to spend my time on. Not on writing content that isn't important to me.<p>The real metrics you should look for is average time spent on site, number of page views per visit unique visitors, what kind of discussion you can generate around it, if people start contacting you for your input.<p>That's worth something and it's solid.

Did anyone else not want to click that, just based on the title?

I once had a blog post get 100,000 uniques in a day: <a href="http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers" rel="nofollow">http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h...</a><p>That was back when Digg could still drive traffic. The Apple interns e-mail list liked my post, and they all upvoted it on Digg (there were a lot of interns).

While we're on the topic, am I the only one who noticed that posts starting like "Am I the only one to think that..." or "I'll probably get downvoted for this but..." tend to get upvoted a lot?<p>I cringe whenever I see this. Usually, the poster's opinion is somewhat obvious and would definitely not get downvoted if it were just stated. But adding the "lone sane person" spin to it seems to get a lot more upvotes anyway.

Shocker, the topic of your blog post determines reader interest and demographic. Isn't most writing for public consumption carefully constructed? One of the tenants of a good author is knowing your audience and writing for them.

I'd like to know how would you get the world to know about your article unless you post it on HN and have small number of twitter followers?

Nothing so special in here. Thats exactly the ways movies have worked, from times immemorial.